From the Cook County Gun ban

Thirdpower has mad details at his place about the Cook County Gun ban. I only want to cover one little piece, which is their new definition of armor piercing ammo.

Metalpiercingbullet means any bullet that is manufactured with other than a lead or lead alloy core, or ammunition of which the bullet itself is wholly composed of, or machined from, a metal or metal alloy other than lead, or any other bullet that is manufactured to defeat or penetrate bullet resistant properties of soft body armor or any other type of bullet resistant clothing which meets the minimum requirements of the current National Institute for Justice Standards for “Ballistic Resistance of Police Body Armor”.

One of the rounds that would be banned by this would be the completely copper self defense rounds from Magtech. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember if anyone else makes a lead free round, but I’m pretty sure that someone does. I know that companies are moving towards lead free because they want to reduce lead pollution, so Cook County is banning non-toxic ammo there as well.

Since 99% of ammo used is manufactured, ammo companies could just make sure all non-lead ammunition is sub-sonic (or of such velocity that it will not pierce body armor versus a comparative lead round). Then we could have environmentally friendly steel ammunition.

Someone could reload the ammunition with different powder to achieve a higher velocity, but this will probably be fairly rare and have little effect nation-wide. (Handloaders can probably do all sorts of neat-o things already.)

(This would only apply to handgun ammunition, of course, as rifles are a completely different story.)

Unless you could argue that the inevitable trace amounts of lead in the tin core makes it a “lead alloy”, then yeah, that too would seem to violate the letter of this law. Who wants to bet Cook Co. will enforce the letter of the law, as opposed to its spirit?

(Moronic, moronic, moronic. What’s up with idiots making laws that regulate the forms of things rather than the things’ effects on society? Don’t they see that the forms are irrelevant and in any event easily changed?)